Now you’d have thought they would have simply held me there and asked questions like young, well-bred people should. But oh, no! They put their boots to me! They were mostly barefooted or wearing sports shoes: otherwise they would have kicked me to death!
Finally one of them got the others away. He was a big one and for a stupid instant I thought he was trying to rescue me. But he stood me up and slammed me back against the wall.
“Where is Heller?” he shouted. It was enough to knock in your eardrums.
I didn’t get any chance to answer. He doubled up his fist and hit me as hard as he could in the jaw!
It knocked me out cold.
Icy water hit me in the face. I was on the floor.
“Let me!” yelled somebody and he picked me up and stood me against the wall.
“Where is Heller?” he screamed at me.
And before I could answer, he hauled off and hit me as hard as he could in the stomach.
I remember thinking as I doubled up and dropped that these young gentlemen could certainly use some lessons in proper prisoner interrogation.
They booted me!
I don’t know how much later it was. I heard a voice from far off. It was a command voice. Some senior officer amongst officers. “Order! Order! What’s he done?”
There was a babble of voices. They had stopped hitting me and kicking me long enough so that I was coming around.
“Put him in that chair,” said this senior command voice.
They slammed me into it so hard I went out again. Then a new shower of icy water hit me. Through its drip I focused my eyes on a powder blue tunic that was in front of me. It was an older officer in full uniform. Probably a Fleet battleship commander. Very tough.
“No, no, back off,” he was saying. “I’ll get your answers.”
I groggily thanked the Devils that somebody was maybe going to listen.
“Where’s Heller?” he barked.
And nobody hit me. They teach you in the Apparatus never to talk when you’re being beaten or tortured.
The question took some sorting out. I could be executed by the Apparatus for revealing the existence of Spiteos. But they weren’t demanding that. They were demanding Heller. I managed to edge around the corner of my training. “I just came to get his baggage,” I said.
“We know,” said the senior officer. “That’s what started all this. Now if you will just tell these young gentlemen where Jettero Heller is, I am sure that life will be . . .”
There were disputant voices. “Don’t promise him anything, sir!” “You better talk!” Things like that.
In my groggy state, the tried and true maxim of the Apparatus surged up: “When in doubt, lie.”
“I’m just a messenger,” I said.
A tumult of objection greeted that.
The senior officer silenced them. “Messenger,” and there was sarcasm in his voice, “Jettero Heller disappeared about five days ago tonight. He was due at a party to celebrate the promotion of a classmate just one hour after that evening’s game. He never showed up. He is very reliable, in fact he is a combat engineer. An orderly was sent to summon him. A check of all headquarters shows no one sent for him. Ten minutes after he went out the arena door, a parking attendant reported seeing black lorries leave the far end of the grounds.”
Wow, I thought to myself, this battleship captain or whatever he was certainly could use some lessons in being an interrogator. He was giving me everything they knew! I was also getting plenty of time to think. Made it as easy as opening up a chank-pop.
“Fleet police have been looking everywhere for him for five days,” this uneducated officer went on.
Spiteos was safe. The Apparatus was safe. The mission was safe. What amateurs these spacers were after all!
“Well, they can stop looking,” I said. And I was very glad to have found out about it. It was almost worth the beating to be able to turn it off. “Jettero Heller was needed for urgent consultation on a matter of the Grand Council.”
It didn’t stop them. But it slowed them down. There were some “yah-yahs” of disbelief. Somebody had a smart idea and dived at me and while another held me, my identoplate was taken from my pocket.
“Section 451 of the Apparatus!” It was a yelp of triumph. It was followed with “I-knew-its,” “Drunks!” and snarls. And they would have attacked again but I had the situation now.
So what if the mission was confidential. “You don’t want that identoplate,” I said coolly. “You want the orders in my paper case. It must be over around the counter. Unfortunately, if you open the case, I will have to swear you all to secrecy. But that’s all right. Go ahead.”
They still didn’t believe me. They found the case—pretty badly smashed it was, too. They brought it over for me to unlock. I rattled off the oath of State secrecy and they all said yes. I opened the case and threw them the Grand Council order and the personnel order of Jettero Heller.
The senior officer read them. Some bright spark from Fleet Intelligence held up his hand to halt any further action, took the two orders and went to the switchboard.
He came back, lips curled in disgust. “The first time anything connected with the drunks was ever straight. They’re authentic. We’ll have to let him go.” Thank the Gods I’d gone to Fleet Personnel before I came to this den of young lepertiges! The magic of a written order. Regardless of what chicanery lay under it. That was the way they ran their lives.
“I came,” I said demurely, “to pick up his baggage.”
The (bleeping) fools thought their friend was safe!
PART TWO
Chapter 7
Jettero Heller’s room apparently lay at the end of a long passageway on the top floor. The hotel manager had shown up, an old spacer with a totally bald head who, judging from burn scars on his face, was a retired gunner. Behind us trooped several of the young officers, led by the biggest one who had done the most beating: they were coming along “just in case.” I really wanted a chance to ransack through his things and find some weaknesses and personal flaws to aid in handling him.
“I think,” I said, “that he’ll be giving up his room. This mission is going to take a while. I’ll be packing up all his possessions.”
The manager didn’t even glance at me but I could see a reaction. It reminded me I was not wholly out of this place yet. We arrived at the last door and he threw it open. He threw it wide open. So I could look.
I’d expected, of course, just a little cubicle, the standard officer’s room. What I saw stopped me dead!
It was a suite! Three spacious rooms stretched out, and way over at the far end of the last one there were big doors and a garden terrace that overlooked the mountains!
A junior officer’s quarters? Oh, no. There was many an admiral who had no such quarters as this!
I went sort of numb. Spacers always tend to bring the look of a ship down to the planet surface. They also have lots of time in space and are given to making things out of whatever is handy: a blastgun breech carved into a wood nymph, a piece of armor shield made into a table, a control seat made into a chair, an acceleration couch converted to a settee, spare porthole casings made into picture frames, that sort of thing. And they were all here, of course, but beautifully done.
One expects the souvenirs from many a planet: the toy muscle-dancing girl that swings her hips as she hands you a bottle opener, the polished shell of a sea animal that glitters but says on it Memories of Bactose, the little boy with six arms who waves flags and spells out Come Home to Erapin, the carved woman that opens an inlaid box and throws you a chank-pop when you say “Kiss me, Serafin!” They were all here along with the banners and wreaths but they were all absolute top of their line: exquisite!
The gleaming metal floors were strewn with rugs from a dozen planets, each one a collector’s item.
And the whole place harmonized together with beautiful taste.
Wow! There was many a Lord who would have envied this layout!<
br />
I at once thought I had Jettero’s fracture point: I doubted he was wealthy in his own right and no Grade Ten junior officer could ever afford a thousandth of this on Fleet pay. Jettero must have both hands in the appropriations take, right up to the elbows!
We stepped over to a musical bar in the first room and the old gunner indicated the whole suite with a sweep of his hand. Like a tourist guide, monotonously, he said, “Five years ago the battleship Menuchenken crashed a thousand miles inside enemy lines on the planet Flinnup. It was hopeless: the ship’s drives were disabled, three thousand officers and crew faced capture and execution. Jettero Heller penetrated the Flinnup defenses with vital spare parts, got the drives operating, pried the Menuchenken out of a caldron of fire and brought her out.”
He paused. “When the Menuchenken crew was released from the hospital, they came here.” He moved his hand slowly to indicate the rooms. “They did this while Jettero was out on another mission—as a gift.”
He indicated the walls and a few of the fittings. “It has been added to since by others. If his present mission took a hundred years, this would still be here. It’s a showplace of the club! And it’s Jettero’s home.”
Oh, well, I thought. So he wasn’t a crook. But people have other fracture points. “I better pick up the few things he will need.”
“Don’t let him touch anything,” said the big, tough officer. “We’ll do any packing.”
They jostled me aside and opened an invisible door, displaying a vast closet of clothes and personal gear. One of the officers lifted a dress uniform off the rack and brought it out.
“No, no,” I said. “He’ll be under cover. No uniforms. Just personal necessities. He’s traveling light.”
They shrugged and began to gather those up. But they had dropped the dress uniform close to me and I looked at it. It was red-piped, of course, and had the gold “Ten” for his grade woven into the stand-up collar. Now most civilians think that the wavy gold, silver and copper lines that ornament the chest of some dress uniforms are just that: ornaments. They wonder sometimes why some junior officer looks like a metal mine on parade and some seniors look so plain. The fact is, those thick, wavy lines of braid are citations; they are sewn in such a way that the top flap can be lifted and under it, in tiny letters, is the citation itself.
Jettero Heller’s dress uniform breast had neither silver nor copper braid. It was an almost solid mass of gold!
I lifted some of the flaps: building a bridge under severe enemy fire; mining in the orbit of Banfochon III; rebuilding the destroyed control center of Hemmerthon under enemy barrage; recovery of the derelict Genmaid; sabotage of the Rollofan transport system; mining the fortress of Montrail . . . On and on! I had to look at several more before I even found the battleship Menuchenken. Jettero Heller’s few years of service had been active ones even for a combat engineer. Behind each one of those brief entries would lie a whole lurid scene of close shaves and violent battle.
I told myself how it must have happened: a fellow gets a reputation and they keep drafting him when the odds look hopeless. And in times of perpetual war, there were lots of these. Then my estimate was soured by noting that what they call the “Volunteer Star”—a blaze of diamonds with a ruby center—was tucked with its ribbon inside the jacket. They award that for fifty perilous volunteers. They didn’t keep drafting him—he kept volunteering!
I thought I had it then: a glory hound. That was his fracture. If I could play on that . . .
“He has a lot of other citations and awards,” said the old gunner-manager. “Some of them are so valuable we keep them in the big vault. He never wears them.”
So he wasn’t a glory hound. Oh, well, there were other faults he might have that I could exploit. I wandered off to look at the walls.
He had a lot of pictures of people. I don’t know why portraitists always insist on cloud-sky backgrounds: when you see one of these three-dimensional color shots against a sky it makes it look like a little bust parked in the heavens; gives it a religious note as though everyone was being made into a goddess or godlet. I don’t like them; they make the viewer feel like he’s in the sky, too, and I don’t care for that.
There was an older woman with a gentle smile, evidently his mother. There was a tough old hawk of a man in a shabby business tunic: it was inscribed “To my dear son.” And then there was one of . . . I stopped dead. I was looking at the most beautiful female I have ever seen in my life. It was one of these trick portraits where the bust follows you with its eyes and when you lower your head it just looks sweet but when you raise it, the lips smile. Honest, this beauty took your breath away! Wow!
I had it now. This was the handle! I turned toward the gunner-manager.
“That’s his sister,” said this hope-shattering fiend. “She’s a star on the Homeview circuit. You must have seen her.”
I hadn’t. We are too busy in the Apparatus for self-indulgence like art. I wandered off to an assembled collection of press photos, all in their fake porthole frames. Jettero with classmates; Jettero being carried on the shoulders of some crew; Jettero finishing a bullet ball tournament; Jettero being introduced at a banquet; Jettero pulling a basketload of survivors into a ship. On and on. But before I could conclude I had a publicity freak on my hands, I noticed that the little other faces in the pictures were circled and their names written under the circles: they were a gallery of his friends, not Jettero. (Bleep), but you can’t succeed with just a few tries.
But there was one of Jettero alone! It was full-color, three-dimensional and gorgeous. He was sitting in the seat of a ship; it was one of these knife-edged racing craft they use in space—the kind that blow up if you just look at them.
“That’s the Chun-chu,” said the gunner-manager. “She broke the Academy interplanetary speed record and it’s never been bettered since. Jet loved that ship. It’s down in the Fleet museum and Jet’s always telling them it will still fly. But you’d have to get an order from the Lord of the Fleet just to move its position on the museum floor. They won’t let Jet go near it so he keeps this picture of it.”
They had a bag packed. It had taken them time because they’d argued amongst themselves about “Jet would want this” and “not want that.”
I was glad to get out of there. For all my prying and hopes, I had really learned nothing useful, nothing that I could use, that is. To handle someone, from an Apparatus viewpoint, you have to have his flaws. And all people have flaws. I told myself I’d keep looking.
We went on downstairs (they call them “ladders” in the club, which is silly because they’re twenty feet wide) and I was about to walk out of the lobby when I found my way blocked.
The biggest, ugliest young officer I have ever seen before or since, stood squarely in the middle of the doorway. And he had the toughest, nastiest expression on his face I never want to see again.
“Drunk,” he said. “I just want you to know that if any of this is crooked, if Jet is not all right, if anything happens to him, we have your identocopies and we have your photo. And remember what I say,” and he spoke in an even, grating voice that leaves the nerves scraped, “we will take you personally ten thousand miles up into cold, empty space; we will remove your clothes; we will push you out the air lock into vacuum. And in seconds you will be a pale pink mist!” The last three words were punctuated with hard firm taps on my chest.
“Right!” It was a roar! It was behind me! And I turned to find that about two hundred young officers were there in a sullen mob.
I am not all that brave. It scared me.
I got by the brute and ran down the steps with the bag. The airbus was there and I dived in.
With shock I saw my driver, Ske, was soaking wet. They must have thrown him in the nearby fountain.
He took off nearly vertical and fast. His hands were clenched and shaking on the controls. He could see me in his rear screen.
“It looks like they really put you through the grinder,” he said.
And it’s true, I must have looked like quite a mess with cuts clotted up and bruises beginning to swell.
He drove for a bit, guiding us into the diversionary course so we could head, undetected, for Spiteos. Then Ske said, “Officer Gris, how could they possibly have known we was from the Apparatus?”
I didn’t answer. Because we’re shabby, I thought. Because we’re dishonest. Because we’re just crooked thugs and never should be permitted to go near decent people. Because we stink. It had been a very trying day.
“Officer Gris,” said the driver when he had the airbus scooting above the floor of the Great Desert, “if you had just told me they would know we was from the Apparatus, I could have brung a blasthoser and wiped the (bleepards) out.”